Judge ‘misled court in case against paedophile teacher’

A JUDGE was yesterday accused of misleading a court and denying justice to victims of a paedophile headmaster.

Andrew Bright QC was named in a parliamentary debate as the barrister for a defence team alleged to have “gravely misled” a court in a historic child abuse case.

Peter Wright was head of £30,000-ayear Caldicott School, which taught pupils aged seven to 13, between 1968 and 1993. In 2003, he was charged with offences against five former pupils but the prosecution was abandoned after a judge ruled his alleged crimes, between 1964 and 1970, occurred so long ago he could not receive a fair trial.

But in 2013, he was jailed for sex offences against five pupils who did not feature in the 2003 indictment. Accusations against Wright, 88, had been heard 10 years earlier, when Judge Bright was a barrister, but were never made in open court as the case had collapsed.

Dame Cheryl Gillan MP yesterday used parliamentary privilege to name Judge Bright as the barrister in the defence team she accused of failing to disclose information that could have prevented the trial collapsing.

Dame Cheryl said the judge and an unnamed solicitor then at law firm Blaser Mills, in High Wycombe, “gravely misled” court over the availability of historic pupil records, which made it difficult to trace witnesses. She said this “could have assisted the prosecution and could, in all probability, have undermined the grounds of the application to stay the indictment.”

Lucy Frazer MP, the solicitor general, insisted the allegations had not been ignored and accusations against those involved had been considered by the police, the Bar Standards Board and Solicitors Regulation Authority, but that she was not aware of any adverse findings against any lawyers involved in criminal proceedings in relation to the abuse of pupils in 1959-70.

A spokesman for Blaser Mills said the defence solicitor on the Wright case left several years ago.

A spokesman for the judiciary said: “The SRA … rejected the complaint that the court had been misled [and] it maintained that conclusion after a review”. He added that Judge Bright had always denied misleading the court.